5. While we lived in denial of the issue of the human condition our main task was nevertheless to solve it

What has been so desperately needed is the dignifying, reconciling, ameliorating understanding of our human condition. Again, as Laurens van der Post said, ‘Only by understanding how we were all a part of the same contemporary pattern [of selfishness, greed, anger, hatred, brutality and indifference] could we defeat those dark forces with a true understanding of their nature and origin’.

The situation facing humanity was most difficult and peculiar because, while the fundamental task for humans was to find ‘understanding of’ the ‘nature and origin’ of the ‘dark forces’ within ourselves, until that understanding was found we couldn’t afford to admit to the existence of the issue of the human condition and therefore acknowledge the all-important and consuming task of solving it. In all but exceptional circumstances we couldn’t afford to acknowledge—even to ourselves—the fundamental dilemma of the human condition or the main undertaking we were all involved in of trying to find the answer to that dilemma. The human race was deeply involved in winning an all-consuming battle but none but the exceptionally secure could admit there was a battle. It was an extraordinary situation that meant that each new generation of humans arriving in the world had to somehow ‘catch on’ to what was going on without being told. The reason the adult world was so immensely superficial and artificial was left as ‘self-evident’ knowledge, which was all very well but you first had to become corrupted for denial to be a self-evident need and by that stage it was too late to know to avoid becoming corrupted. It is little wonder young people struggled mightily with this terrible ‘silence’ of the adult world of denial/ lying. Children tried to understand what was going on but, in their billions down through the ages, were defeated by the silence; they were in effect being inducted into the very necessary great and noble lie that humanity as a whole was having to practice. (Note, a full presentation of the process of resignation to a life of living in denial that young adolescents have had to go through can be found in the ‘Resignation’ chapter in A Species In Denial.)

The integrity, naivety and vulnerability of children is apparent in the fact that while adults fail to recognise the imperfection, hypocrisy and dilemma of the human condition that pervades all of human existence now, children still see it, asking a myriad of confronting questions: ‘Mum, why do you and Dad shout at each other?’ and ‘why are we going to a big, expensive party when the family down the road is so poor?’ and ‘why is everyone so unhappy and preoccupied?’ and ‘why are people so fake?’ and ‘why do men kill each other?’ and ‘why did those people fly those planes into those buildings?’ The truth is these are the real questions about human life. As Nobel Prize-winning biologist George Wald pointed out, ‘The great questions are those an intelligent child asks and, getting no answers, stops asking’ (quoted in Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine, p.197 of 384). The reason children ‘stopped asking’ the real questions was because they soon realised that for some inexplicable reason adults wouldn’t or couldn’t answer their questions and were in fact made distinctly uncomfortable by them. While adults haven’t been able to cope with the confronting questions that are raised by the utter hypocrisy of human behaviour and Page 24 of
PDF Version have made themselves immune to it, children are only too aware of the hypocrisy. Two-thirds of the world’s population starves while the rest bathe in material comfort and still go on seeking more wealth and luxury. Humans can be heartbroken when they lose a loved one yet are capable of shooting one of their own family. We will dive into raging torrents to help strangers without thought of self but are capable of molesting children. We torture one another but are so loving we will freely give our life for another’s. A community will pool its efforts to save a kitten stranded up a tree yet humans will ‘eat elaborately prepared dishes featuring endangered animals’ (Time mag. 8 Apr. 1991). We have had the sensitivity to create the profound beauty of the Sistine Chapel, yet are so insensitive as to knowingly pollute our planet to the point of threatening our very own existence.

In this situation where adult humans couldn’t acknowledge the fundamental dilemma of the human condition, or the main undertaking we were all involved in of trying to find the answer to it, it is not surprising that it is extremely rare to find acknowledgment of the human condition and our task of solving it. Once again it required an exceptionally honest thinker and great literary talent in the form of literary Nobel laureate Albert Camus to manage it. In his 1940 essay The Almond Trees, Camus wrote: ‘men have never ceased to grow in the knowledge of their destiny. We have not overcome our condition, and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but that we must refuse [deny] this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as men is to find those few first principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must stitch up what has been torn apart, render justice imaginable in the world which is so obviously unjust, make happiness meaningful for nations poisoned by the misery of this century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But tasks are called superhuman when men take a long time to complete them, that is all.’ Like Berdyaev when he wrote that ‘we cannot rest in the thought that that distinction [between good and evil] is ultimate’ and that what was required to find such ‘moral knowledge’ is a ‘fearless…prophetic…revelation of a clear conscience’, Camus continued on from his words above about the need ‘to find those few first principles that will’ ‘overcome our condition’ by predicting that even in this ‘winter for the world’ of terminal levels of depression and alienation there will still be enough innocent strength left in the human race to defy the rampant denial and find ‘the fruit’, the liberating understanding of ‘our condition’. He wrote: ‘This world is poisoned by its misery, and seems to wallow in it. It has utterly surrendered to that evil which [German philosopher Friedrich] Nietzsche called the spirit of heaviness [depression]. Let us not contribute to it. It is vain to weep over the mind, it is enough to labour for it. But where are the conquering virtues of the mind?…Before the vastness of the undertaking, let no one in any case forget strength of character. I do not mean the one accompanied on electoral platforms by frowns and threats. But the one that, through the virtue of its whiteness [innocence] and its sap [defiance of the alienated world of denial], stands up to all the winds from the sea [of denial]. It is that which, in the winter for the world, will prepare the fruit’ (Summer, 1954, pp.33—35 of 87). As will be explained shortly, the critical element needed for the human condition to be solved was sufficient scientific knowledge about the mechanisms of the workings of our world to make clarifying explanation of the human condition possible. Certainly a degree of denial-free, innocent soundness was needed to assemble, synthesise and bring forward the explanation of the human condition that these scientific discoveries have made possible, but the real liberation of humanity from the human condition depended on science doing its job, and, as we will see, that is what science had succeeded in doing. It should also be said, and this will become clear later, that while science had done its job of finding sufficient knowledge to make explanation of the human condition possible, it had through that process taken the art of denial to such extreme lengths that it almost made the truth about the human condition unreachable. It will be documented shortly how science was drowning in a sea of extreme dishonesty.